anics of unity need both earnest advocacy and
careful study. But beneath and beyond them a motive force has to be
found in ideals and sentiments by which alone in the end the working of
all such mechanical arrangements is rendered possible. Right sentiments
are not a sufficient safeguard, but they are an essential foundation,
and it is of the first importance to realize the things to which the
mass of mankind are most deeply attached, how they are affected towards
one another, the channels through which the tide of feeling most
naturally flows and is extended. Looked at from this point of view the
problem becomes primarily an educational one. We study mankind as we
find it in order to effect an improvement in the direction which we
desire.

We find then in the first place that men as a rule are most strongly
attached to the localities and the people with whom they are first
brought closely in contact. Here in the family is the first true
microcosm, the first community in which the individual is developed by
association with his fellows. On the value of this earliest social
training there are hardly two opinions, and we need not dwell upon it.
It is at the next stage that divergence, both of definite opinion and
still more of emphasis, begins to be apparent. How far is attachment to
country a valuable thing, how far should it be cultivated, what are the
necessary limitations and controlling ideas? As to the reality of the
sentiment every man can examine himself. We know, most of us, with what
intense satisfaction we return to the country, the district, of our
birth and home. The feeling is one of the strongest and deepest things
in us, even if our reason deprecates and disallows the claim. As
Englishmen, perhaps even more as Scotchmen and Irish, we love with an
indefinable and ineradicable passion our sea-coast, our hills and
valleys, the fields and cottages, even the sometimes sordid, nearly
always ill-assorted, congeries of houses which we have thrown together
as towns. We fight among ourselves, we have more religious, political,
and social differences than any other people. Yet when we need
companionship for work or pleasure, at home or abroad, we would sooner
have an Englishman at our side than any other man. Men and
country--'dear souls and dear, dear land'--these are the elements which
make up the real thing called patriotism and which, in spite of all our
curses and all our self-seeking, lead us in millions to wor